Video Poker Odds

How often you actually improve your hand

The royal flush odds page answers one specific question exactly. This page answers the bigger version of it: under optimal play, how often does every single paying hand actually show up? Every number below comes from the same computation, extended to all ten hand categories at once, run across every one of the 2,598,960 possible deals in 9/6 Jacks or Better.

9/6 Jacks or Better: the complete picture

These add up to exactly 100% (our engine's internal check sums to 1.000000), because every one of the 2,598,960 possible deals ends in exactly one of these ten outcomes once you draw with optimal strategy. A few things worth sitting with: you win something on 45.5% of hands — less than half, which is why a session can feel cold even when you're playing perfectly. And a plain high pair, the smallest paying hand, is almost 86 times as common as four of a kind, a straight flush, and a royal flush combined. Most of a session is small, frequent wins, not the rare big ones — the big ones are what people remember, but the high pair is what's actually paying the bills.

How the pay table changes what you actually see

The frequency of each category shifts, sometimes a lot, when the pay table changes what's worth chasing. Here's the same breakdown for three other games on this site, computed the identical way:

The standout is Triple Double Bonus's flush: 1 in 64, dramatically more common than Jacks or Better's 1 in 91. That's not a coincidence of the deal; Triple Double Bonus pays 7 for a flush versus Jacks or Better's 6, so optimal strategy chases four-card flush draws more readily, and the flush frequency rises to match. The reverse trade shows up in Triple Double Bonus's royal flush frequency (1 in 45,358, the worst of these four): chasing flush and quad draws more aggressively means marginally fewer of the highest-value royal draws get chased with the same priority. Double Double Bonus's straight jumps too (1 in 78 vs Jacks or Better's 1 in 89), for the same kind of reason.

What this means at the table

Two practical takeaways. First, the "cold streak" feeling is normal, not a sign anything is wrong: you win nothing on more than half of all hands even playing perfectly, and the small, frequent wins (a high pair, two pair) do almost all of the work of keeping a session afloat between the rare big hands. Second, if you're deciding which bonus game to play partly on "how often do I feel like I'm doing something," a game like Triple Double Bonus genuinely does deliver flushes more often, which is a real, computed difference in how a session feels, separate from its return or variance. See the full game comparison for how that connects to overall variance.

How this was computed

For every one of the 2,598,960 possible deals, the engine determines the optimal hold using the real pay table (the same computation behind the return calculator), then measures the exact probability distribution over all ten final-hand categories under that specific hold, for every one of the ten categories at once. Averaging across all 2,598,960 deals, weighted correctly, gives the exact frequency of every outcome under perfect play. Not simulated, not sampled. See the methodology page for the general explanation, and the royal flush odds page for the same technique applied to just the top category in more depth.

Keep going

Drill the decisions that lead to these hands in the trainer, check the exact strategy chart for any of these games in the strategy hub, or see how these frequencies roll up into overall variance in the game comparison.

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